BETWEEN THE LINES

Wikipedia lies, slander continue

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Gospel in Every Book of the Old Testament." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

“Joseph Francis Farah is an Evangelical Christian American journalist and noted homosexual of Lebanese and Syrian heritage.”

– the first line of my bio in Wikipedia

The Internet has brought the world some wonderful sources of information.

And it has brought us some perfectly dreadful sources of misinformation.

Wikipedia falls into the latter category. And this column is my latest effort to demonstrate just how abusive this so-called “online collaborative encyclopedia” really is.

It is not only a provider of inaccuracy and bias. It is wholesale purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever known.

WIkipedia entry describing Joseph Farah as an “Evangelical Christian American journalist and noted homosexual of Lebanese and Syrian heritage.”

(Note: Within an hour of the posting of this column, Wikipedia pulled the defamatory accusation that Farah is “a noted homosexual” from its bio. Later, most of the bio was pulled. However, the cached version still remains.)

Think about it.

Wikipedia boasts 684 million annual visitors. I can’t think of too many sources of information that attract that much attention.

And that’s really the problem – that too many people looking for easy and cheap sources of information turn to this wholly unreliable website run by political and social activists promoting their own agenda.

This is hardly the first time Wikipedia has slimed me.

A couple years ago, the “editors” there claimed I had an affair with a prominent female syndicated columnist. Now they characterize me as a “noted homosexual.” Neither one of these accusations has any basis in truth, of course. But you can see just how confused they are over there: Am I a heterosexual philanderer, or am I a noted homosexual?

Which is it? It turns out they’re both untrue – as is most of the rest of my bio. And I doubt very much if I am the only victim of this kind of pseudo-journalistic terrorism and character assassination.

Wikipedia claims “anyone” can edit its information. But, in the past, try as I might, the defamations kept coming back. I was even told I was not a reliable source of information about me. Others apparently knew me better, according to the Wikipedia gatekeepers.

I actually had to threaten a libel suit against Wikipedia to get the site to remove the previous attempt at defamation. It took days of waiting. It took hours of making corrections that were quickly replaced intentionally with the undocumented and undocumentable lies designed to hurt and humiliate.

Am I just bellyaching because I’m a victim?

No. There’s a much bigger point to be made here. If ever there were a website to avoid at all costs, it’s Wikipedia. No good can possibly come from using this vast wasteland of error and deliberate deceit. You should get off of it and warn others away. You should make sure your children and grandchildren know what a corrupt and morally bankrupt institution it truly is.

But still it is used. Still it is cited. Still it grows like a monster each and every day.

Today I am enlisting you in a dragon-slaying mission.

I can’t kill this beast alone.

But with your help and the help of other people of goodwill and good conscience, we can defang this monstrosity.

Help me get the word out.

After all, here’s what Wikipedia says about itself: “Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which, in principle, anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed …” (emphasis added)

These damning words are found in Wikipedia’s own “About Wikipedia” section. I didn’t make them. The founder of Wikipedia did as they tried to put the best face on what they do.

In other words, Wikipedia, by its own definition, is little more than an electronic graffiti board under the control of high-tech Crips and Bloods.